“So… just the two of us?” asked Sabrina cautiously, her eyes narrowing as she looked at me. Considering her resemblance to the lovely, heroic cartoon version of Mulan, her momentary distrust was very, very apparent. It was the look you’d give a used-car salesman offering you a pristine ‘97 Honda Civic for five hundred bucks. You know there’s a catch; you just haven’t found the hidden compartment full of severed fingers yet.
I nodded, the motion feeling overly earnest. “Yes. Heck, if I knew anything about the herbs you need, I wouldn’t bring you with me at all. My idea of foraging usually involves a vending machine and a well-placed kick. This is… specialized.”
“But this is a severe danger zone,” she pressed, her voice a low, serious hum. “There are lesser kaiju and monsters everywhere, as well as the possible presence of a known hostile force of cultivators, and you haven’t mentioned having any offensive abilities at all.”
I nodded again. My neck was going to get a workout today. “That’s exactly why it’s just us two. You already know I can get us out of trouble if I need to, but I don’t know if I can move more than just the two of us. And I do have a few offensive abilities.” Mostly involving running away very effectively. The microkinesis was great for precision work, but for outright kaiju-smashing, I’d need a week, a nuclear reactor, and a permit I’d never get from the BSA.
I sighed and cradled the shears I had just accidentally destroyed. My new, improved, “mythical physique” was a gift that kept on giving, usually in the form of broken furniture and maimed cutlery. I was still getting used to the raw, unvarnished power of my body, which had actually increased more than my prior artificial boosts had permitted. The stainless steel blades had gotten crushed while I was carrying them and we jumped down from the roof I’d ported us onto to get a decent idea of the layout of the beach right now. It was like being a toddler again, all clumsy strength and no fine motor control, except this time a tantrum could punch through a bank vault.
The beach was… bad. It was the kind of place a post-apocalyptic travel agency would feature on its “Don’t Go Here” brochure. Giant aquatic lizards the size of busses were lying down on every inch of sand where the old resort had been, sunning themselves like grotesque, scaly tourists. They probably had timeshares. And while Sabrina had absolutely been able to identify several useful herbs that had been growing in what used to be balcony gardens on some of the high-rises, she had pointed out that the monsters that infested the zone could provide very valuable ingredients as well. Because of course they could. Why just pick flowers when you can also perform an impromptu dissection on a creature that could swallow your car whole?
I carefully straightened out and reformed the bladed cutters I had designed for quickly retrieving stems no matter how durable. I also, unfortunately, had to recover my finger that the nearly mono-molecular edge had sliced off when I had gripped them too tight on landing. Not to mention it friggin’ hurt. I’d had worse—getting your heart broken by a corporate superheroine turned out to be more emotionally devastating than a little digital dismemberment—but just the shock of seeing your own finger flopping around on one of the concrete porches like a confused, fleshy worm was a hard thing to deal with before coffee.
Sabrina, before she’d ever even joined us, had darned near a class two physique, which made hopping from balcony to balcony to retrieve mutated vegetation a breeze. But with all of the essence flowing smoothly through my flesh, and the reinforcements from that, I was pretty sure my own body enhancement would qualify as a class three… and yet when my hand involuntarily tightened on the custom-made shears, it had gone through my heavy gauntlets, lopped off one finger, and almost taken off a second. My body was now a weapon of mass construction and destruction, mostly aimed at my own possessions.
Right now, as proud as I was of my armor, my own body was actually tougher than it was, which Sabrina told me signified that I had completed the very first stage of body tempering and halfway through essence gathering. Body tempering was the very first stage of what she termed ‘mortal realm cultivation’, which meant that the idea of someone who had finished higher tiers was somewhat terrifying… class eight? That would barely be considered the beginning of Asura realm, the second of seven stages of ascension. It put Graviton’s casual planet-cracking potential into a horrifying new context. No wonder the man floated everywhere; he was probably afraid of accidentally stomping a continent into dust.
She said that higher tiers couldn’t even set foot on Earth without having a crushing, awe-inspiring effect on the local terrain, killing people, and possibly destroying kaiju from their presence alone, unless they intentionally suppressed their aura. That sort of made me wonder how in the hell humans had managed to drive the Serenoids off… if they had higher realm cultivators, they should have made short work even of the powerful class sixes that had dealt with them. Unless there was a reason that they couldn’t enter Earth’s atmosphere. Maybe it was poison, or maybe more efficient Serenoid bodies couldn’t handle the untamed chaos energy infecting Earth, maybe nothing more powerful could transit rifts, or maybe their cultivation was capped out at the top of human-realm. Neither of us had any idea. My best theory was that Earth’s ambient chaos energy gave them cosmic indigestion. It was the one defense mechanism we had that didn’t involve throwing enough nukes to glass the planet.
I shook my hand quickly—the reattached finger still itched—and hopped to another balcony thirty feet away, where another potted plant with great, shimmering leaves draped off the side of the half-broken building. I trimmed a few leaves, one of the large pink flowers, and some kind of growth off of the stem, as well as yanking out one of the roots, grateful that this time, at least, the plant wasn’t trying to eat me. Small victories.
According to Sabrina, virtually everything that lived in this region was soaking in chaotic essence, and so far virtually every plant and animal that survived here was mutated into an essence-absorbing form, which meant alchemical value once she was able to do whatever it was she did. I could detect certain flavors of essence flowing through the plants, but I had neither the training nor the gifts to determine what sort of chemical preparations they would have to go through to be useful to her. To me, it was all just radioactive salad.
Finding so many living plants was a surprising windfall, even considering how each apartment was draped with foliage back when this was a resort. Sabrina was actually shocked at the amount of survivors, and we had collected a large number of samples. My backpack was starting to look like the world’s most dangerous farmer’s market.
Supposedly, there were even techniques to gathering them that would make them better, but she had no more idea of what those could be than I did without knowing each individual new breed, and considering how fast they mutated in this zone, we decided to just grab leaves, stems, flowers, any fruits, nuts, or off bumps or protrusions, and a sample of roots, especially if they had bulbs. Our strategy was essentially “grab everything and let the demonic alchemist sort it out later.” It wasn't elegant, but it beat getting eaten.
Now she wanted samples of the creatures, claiming she could determine which parts would be useful, and while I personally would prefer to just mist us back to the island, we had no idea if the wildlife would offer us what she needed. My vote was for “absolutely not,” but since my vote was apparently worth less than a freshly severed finger in this partnership, here we were.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, looking over at the weirdest thing I had seen on this trip full of very weird things. It looked like all of the essence near a spot on the shore was getting whirled around by a strange point. Unlike the rest of the beach, the lizards seem to be steering well clear of the energy, but when I looked at it with my normal sight, it wasn’t there except for a surprisingly thick layer of beach grass and weeds. It was a hole in the world’s ugliness, a pristine circle the monsters were politely avoiding. My paranoia, honed by years of villainy and one spectacularly bad relationship, immediately began screaming trap.
I had seen pictures of rifts before, they looked sort of like a stationary heat wave outlined in a shimmery light. This did not really remotely resemble that, so I wondered if this was one of those power points that Graviton had mentioned. It might be worth getting a closer look, and it didn’t seem to have any enemies close to it… and besides, I was very confident in my apportation, it had saved my life many times. Overconfidence, thy name is Jake Doyle, and thy reward is usually a trip to the emergency room.
“What’s what?”
“There’s a sort of weird essence whirl in the air.”
She looked at it again, and then shook her head, her eyes going wide. “Oh my goodness!”
“What? Is it a kaiju spa? A dimensional dog park?”
“It’s a node! A pure one… no wonder there was a portal here!”
I hopped back to her balcony, where she was leaning against the brick wall and staring intently at the phenomenon like it was the last chocolate bar in a dieter’s pantry.
“What is a node?”
She smiled a little, a real, genuine expression of awe. “Have you heard of ley lines?”
I shrugged. “Sort of? I know that they are supposed to be invisible magical lines where people build monuments and temples and stuff. I don’t know about any factual accounts, though, except that stonehenge, a famous monument, was supposed to be built on one.” My knowledge came mostly from late-night cable TV and the ramblings of conspiracy theorists I’d worked with. Not the most reliable sources.
She nodded, falling into her familiar lecturing mode. “A node is where two or more ley lines cross. On most worlds, ley lines absorb the chaos essence of the areas the pass through and help purify it into natural essence, which cultivators can use more easily, and mages and formation experts can channel into powerful magic. Where they surface, often in mountains or remote and dangerous places, natural treasures or strong cultivation gardens can be found.”
“Finding a node here might explain why there is so much chaos essence in the area. This is a good thing, since ley lines are the planet’s way of absorbing and protecting itself from Chaos energies, but this planet has nowhere near enough. The ley lines draw Chaos essence in order to absorb.”
She pointed one slender finger at the spot. “That area is extremely pure. That is probably why the Kaiju dare not approach. They are attracted by all of the chaos essence in the area, but around the node proper it has been greatly purified as it is fed into the node itself by the junction. That is probably why there was a portal here decades ago.”
“Why is that?”
She smiled, “World portals can only form on a node. The one I came through was formed on a small, weak node, with the help of a great deal of blood essence. This node, though, is pure and powerful enough that a portal might have formed spontaneously before it was somehow closed by this world’s heroes.”
I nodded, the pieces clicking into a very dangerous picture. “So it’s like a weak spot?”
She shook her head, “No, The weak spots are where rifts form… this is the opposition, a strong spot where connections between ordered worlds are formed. Of course, the fact that it is unprotected is dangerous, but not because it will form and mutate creatures into monsters, rather because it’s an open beacon to other worlds and beings in search of essence. This is a good place for a sect of cultivators, both for the training opportunities from the creatures that are drawn here, and for either human or otherworld cultivators to meditate and gain pure energy. The only flaw is that this world’s chaos essence is far too strong. We should investigate it.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Like, get close to it?” I asked, my voice dripping with the sheer, unadulterated stupidity of the idea. “You realize it’s surrounded by at least class five monsters, right? It’s like suggesting we investigate the gold reserves in Fort Knox by strolling through the main gate. Theoretically possible, but practically suicidal.”
She nodded, utterly undeterred. “Yes, but see how they avoid it? You should be able to gain your energy quickly from it, and the greenery surrounding it? It probably contains some amazing alchemical herbs. Because of it’s purity, I doubt very much it would interfere with your… strange transit power.”
I looked more carefully. “Herbs? I just see a bunch of beach grass, some weeds, and the occasional dandelion. There’s a lot more herbs on the balconys surrounding us.” It looked like a vacant lot that had been forgotten by the city landscapers.
She laughed, a light, musical sound that was utterly out of place in this hellscape. “Maybe you shouldn’t judge by appearances. That beach grass is spirit grass, one of the most common, and useful, herbs used by alchemy. The Dandelions are positively soaked in positive essence, and are incredibly useful for most medicinal pills, and there are some other plants as well, but… you don’t have the alchemy gift so you probably cannot detect them from here.”
I nodded slowly, the siren song of a easy power-up warring with a lifetime of cynical self-preservation. “Well, it looks safe, and I don’t know if we will get another opportunity if we skip this one. This may seem stupidly genre blind, but we should probably pop over there, see what we can collect, then use it as a safe zone to hit some of the lizards and see if they have useful alchemical reagents.” I was literally narrating my own doom. I might as well have said, “What could possibly go wrong?”
“Genre blind?”
I nodded, “Yep. If this was an adventure movie, the whole area would be some kind of a trap for us. Like a giant worm underground waiting to snap up anything that enters the area, or it would be covered by invisible monsters that the lizards can see but we can’t. Genre blind means we ignore all the warning signs and just assume that everything will be alright.” I was giving the universe a written invitation to prove me wrong.
She smiled slightly, “Then I guess I am genre blind, because I am not detecting any essence fluctuations outside of the node itself. It’s possible that there are undetectable creatures hiding in that area, but if there are, their power and cultivation must be so much higher than ours that they can render themselves undetectable to us with ease, and that’s impossible.”
“Why do you say that?”
She tapped the wall next to her. “Because if they existed, they would already know we are here, and if they wanted to take us out, they would have been able to do it easily at any point.”
“That’s a remarkably astute observation.”
I spun around and prepared to grab Sabrina and shoot off, because that voice had not been me, when a sudden incredible, intolerable pressure seemed to slam into me, crushing my thoughts, my fears, my very will to exist into a tiny, insignificant speck. In a few moments the world faded to sparkling blackness. My last thoughts were Shit, that’s what I get for genre blindness. And for not listening to the part of my brain that had a PhD in Worst-Case Scenarios.
Earlier - When My Biggest Problem Was a B+ in Kaiju Studies
Mid-terms had been remarkably easy, but then, when you have the ability to blueprint information, memorizing whatever silly information you need to for a college course is childishly simple in comparison to the relative positions and compositions of nearly incomprehensible numbers of molecules each time I blueprinted something. It was like being asked to solve 2+2 after years of doing advanced calculus in your head. The hardest part was pretending to struggle.
Analyzing and applying that information to provide meaningful breakdowns of the consequences was also easy, since most of it was stuff I had learned, either in college or through experience on both sides of the law. I suspected later semesters might be more challenging, but while I don’t automagically remember everything I see, hear, or read, deciding to memorize something gave me a full and complete picture whenever I chose to recall it. The human brain is a messy, disorganized filing cabinet. My mind was a supercomputer with a perfect search function. It was the one part of my life that wasn't a complete dumpster fire.
The trick was not scoring a perfect score on the multiple choice questions, the trick was to score nearly perfect but with enough of a margin for error to convince people that you were merely sharp, since I really didn’t want people to figure out my trick. Obviously the term blueprint was a hint, but no matter how much I trusted this school and it’s people, I didn’t trust them that much. Paranoia is just what you call good sense when everyone is potentially a super-powered spy.
As his project for power exploitation, he’d shown off his lower-tier armor, the one with minimal myofibril strands mostly designed for counteracting hyperextension and reinforcing set extensions like grip and carrying. The teacher, an old gadgeteer named Twitchblade whose fingers actually did twitch with a low-grade kinetic energy, had been surprisingly impressed with a rather cheap innovation by my standards, a set of myofiber whips, one in each arm, that stretched out to 50 feet and had just enough programmed logic to wrap around anything they hit and retract on command.
I mean, obviously they were strong, since they were made of woven silicon and carbon nanotube fibers, and the myofibers in my suit arms were designed specifically to help prevent someone from dislocating shoulders or pulling their arm muscles when they were swinging and decided to catch something like a flying car, but I had seen people do vastly more impressive things. I’d once seen a guy turn a toaster into a plasma cannon. My whips were basically fancy bungee cords.
I honestly thought it was the whole suit, but when she spoke with me about my grade, she explained that having decent grapplers that were designed to protect the gadgeteer from the stress of using them was what really impressed her.
“So these are not for you?”
I shook my head, “No, I don’t particularly like the idea of power armor, and nerve response systems are incredibly picky and at best slow, I meant these for others to use, and the reinforcements are designed to reinforce strength reactively instead of proactively.” I was a support player at heart, building gear for the main characters who got to do the cool, flashy stuff. It was a comfortable, if slightly bitter, niche.
She had laughed, a sound like grinding gears, and given me a perfect grade. Apparently few designers actually designed stuff for others to use, and even fewer built them from the ground-up with human limits in mind, but since I still planned to be the back line guy, it only made sense to make broad utility systems for a team. My entire business model was based on other people’s incompetence and lack of foresight. It was a growth industry.
The practice for teamwork had been similarly uneventful. Technically our team had lost, but I had pressed the fact that we were not trying to beat the artificial villains in the scenario, we were trying to accomplish the mission’s stated goal, rescuing civilians, which we did with only one technical casualty. Sabrina and I had headed to the top of a skyscraper to help coordinate the team, and a ‘victim’ had jumped out of one of the windows to escape a simulated monster… I had caught the dummy on the way down, using my new grapplers, but the stress meter indicated that I would have fractured the guy’s spine while stopping his fall, putting him in the hospital or paralyzing him. A classic case of winning the battle but losing the war on spinal integrity.
I happily took the credit for that screw-up, since the teacher was right, although I did point out that he wasn’t actually going to die and I could have blueprinted him back to perfect health afterwards. The whole thing got our team an overall A+, even though my personal grade was A- for preventable damage. I’d take the team win. It was better for my cover, and my ego was already bruised enough from daily life.
Game Theory, Advanced anatomy, and combat logistics were mostly just tests to make sure you memorized the information, and the essays for game theory and kaiju tactics were almost fun… I had thought I would get a great grade on kaiju tactics, because of my essay on exploiting structural weaknesses with microkinetic attacks, but I only got a B for that because I forgot to account for the environment… in my armor, I wasn’t too worried about environmental problems other than water, but I sort of forgot that rarely there was a dragon or other sort of kaiju that was absolutely air-based. My professor’s note read, “Excellent analysis, but you seem to have assumed all kaiju battles occur in a featureless white room.” It was a fair cop.
Me, personally, I was solidly in the top ten percent of first years without standing out too much. Abigail was technically the valedictorian, but she had to take special oral exams due to her unique ability to retrieve information. I suspected she was holding back. A honeypot operative doesn’t get to be the best unless it serves her mission.
Our team as a whole, though was number five on the academic leaderboards, and even Candace manage to get her credits ironed out. It helped that both Abbey and I had been helping her study, despite the majority of her classes being second year. Turns out, when your tutor can perfectly recall the textbook and your other tutor can hack the answer key, grades tend to improve.
Quiet code had eluded me by virtue of the fact that I wasn’t permitted on the second-year floor, and we didn’t share any classes. Honestly, I was about ready to write her off, except that I still thought that Kate was working hard to keep her elusive for some unfathomable reason. I was close to asking Abbey for help setting up some sort of meeting, but I decided to wait until after winter break to go that far. Involving one mysterious girl who knew my secrets to get to another mysterious girl felt like a recipe for a catastrophic plot complication.
Yeah, I get it, Kate had made no secret of the fact that we had shared something special, and had made it clear that she would very much be interested in getting closer, a lot closer… but she was a little too much like Christine for my tastes, as far as attitude and personality, and I had been down the competitive girlfriend road before. We still trained together, but I had no way of helping her past a certain threshold… a threshold that Sabrina told me would probably be impossible to cross in this world’s chaos-heavy essence. My love life was a series of energy crises and spiritual bonds with ambitious women. I needed a hobby. A normal one. Like stamp collecting.
Apparently, most people that were trying to cross into the human realm from the mortal realm would sit down some place with plenty of appropriate essence, clear their mind, and break through when they had gathered enough essence. She had warned me about some kind of tribulation, but something about the world, perhaps the mad levels of chaos essence or possibly my own monster core, was interfering with that crossover despite the fact that my energy pool was practically brimming with condensed essence.
Condensed essence, or rather, the essence that surrounded my core, was what was supposed to solidify into a true core, eventually. This was not energy I could actually use, that was in the dantian surrounding it, but was almost like a second shell.
In my case, I needed to do something to destabilize that ‘natural’ core so that I could absorb the energy inside, what I considered my ‘superpowers’, into my dantian, allowing it to form a true foundation with my power as its building blocks and my dao as its mortar.
Yeah, the construction metaphors were a little lost on me, but I was happy to consider my foundation as a race track and my Dao as the tires, and my current power core as a gigantic wreck right in the middle of the track. I could clear the wreck, and use it for spare parts and to rebuild the track, but I was going to need some help, especially since Graviton himself hadn’t gotten any farther than I had. He’d just built a longer track around the wreck.
Unless a pure node or realm magically appeared somewhere on Earth, a chance more rare than winning the lottery, or a pill could be made that would help break that wreck up, my dantian MIGHT continue to grow, but I will never be able to get my wheels on the track past the core.
Which was why, when most of my team went home or to visit family for winter break, two of the ‘school orphans’, Sabrina and I, had decided to go searching for spirit grass, a monstrous acid, and more ingredients for what she referred to as a ‘yin/yang heaven and earth spirit stabilization pill’. It sounded like something a shady street vendor would sell you from a trench coat.
And of course, like an idiot, I refused to realize that the incredibly rare chance of a pure node becoming available on Earth would probably be protected by something a little more formidable than a few class 6 kaiju lizards. It would be protected by the narrative itself, and I had just walked us right into its clutches.
